


The Manor Ghost

by sophene



Series: Gotham's Protector Universe [4]
Category: Batgirl (Comics), Batman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bruce Wayne is Not Batman, Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Gen, Selina Kyle is a Vigilante
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:08:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28941963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophene/pseuds/sophene
Summary: Tim's clothes have been disappearing. He thinks the Manor is haunted.
Relationships: Alfred Pennyworth & Bruce Wayne, Cassandra Cain & Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne, Tim Drake & Bruce Wayne, Tim Drake & Dick Grayson & Jason Todd, Tim Drake & Jason Todd
Series: Gotham's Protector Universe [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2095662
Comments: 7
Kudos: 162





	The Manor Ghost

Tim had only been living with them for about three months when he started to complain about the Manor being haunted.

“The Manor’s not haunted, Tim,” Bruce said.

“Ghosts exist. Haven’t you seen Secret on TV?” Tim asked.

Jason, his mouth full of Alfred’s macaroni and cheese, shot Tim a doubtful look and said, “Who?”

“Secret is one of the members of Young Justice. She’s a ghost. I saw her on the news,” Tim said.

“Ghosts may be real, but there are no ghosts in this house,” Bruce said.

“There could be ghosts in this house. That guest room on the second floor with the creepy bride painting definitely has a vibe,” Dick said.

“If the Manor isn’t haunted then what keeps happening to my sweatpants?” Tim asked.

“How can you even find anything in your room?” Jason asked. “It’s a mess.”

“Why would a ghost be stealing your sweatpants?” Bruce asked.

Tim shot a disgruntled look around the table at all of them. “I’ve had three pairs of sweatpants go missing. Including my favorite ones.”

“Maybe one of the other boys is taking them,” Bruce said.

Jason made a face and said, “Gross. I wouldn’t wear his nasty sweatpants even if they were clean.”

“We couldn’t fit into them anyway,” Dick said as he reached across the table for the salt.

Tim shot a second disgruntled look around the table at all of them and dropped the subject, remaining silent through the rest of dinner. Bruce wasn’t worried about it. He certain the missing sweatpants would turn up sooner or later.

* * *

The missing sweatpants did not turn up.

In fact, another two weeks passed and Tim started complaining about other possessions of his that were going missing. So far he’d complained about the sweatpants, one of his hoodies, some socks, a jacket, and other random items like his hairbrush and the Chapstick from his backpack. He started complaining the missing items so often that Bruce finally went up to Jason’s room one evening and interrogated him about it.

“Are you messing with Tim?” Bruce asked him.

“No,” Jason said flatly. 

“Very convincing.”

“Why would I mess with him? So long as he stays on the other side of the house I have no problems with him,” Jason said. His face was a picture of innocence.

Bruce put his hands on his hips and gazed sternly down at his second eldest. Unsurprisingly, Jason had put up some token protests when Bruce announced that he was becoming Tim’s legal guardian. However, Bruce had been under the impression that Jason and Tim only still squabbled with each other for his benefit, like a couple of stubborn house cats who didn’t want anyone to know they’d gotten used to each other.

“If you are messing with him and I find out, I am going to be very disappointed in you. You understand that, correct?” Bruce asked.

Jason looked annoyed and offended. “Are you going to go throw accusations in Dick’s face after this? Or am I the one who gets them because I’m the hood trash?”

Bruce sighed. “Dick isn’t getting accused of anything because he never treated Tim with open hostility. Do you promise you haven’t been hiding his things?”

“Yes, I promise,” Jason said.

Bruce didn’t feel very satisfied as he left Jason’s room. Jason was annoyed now, muttering about Bruce loud enough so that Bruce could hear what he was saying, and Bruce still had no idea what was happening to Tim’s things.

He decided to go down the hall to Dick’s room and ask him too, just to cover his bases. But when Bruce asked Dick if he was taking Tim’s things, Dick frowned and shook his head. He looked kind of amused when he said, “Why would I hide Tim’s things?”

“This family has grown a lot over the past couple of years. It was just the two of us and Alfred for a long time. I wouldn’t blame you if you were bitter about my divided attention,” Bruce explained.

“I like Tim and Jason. Most of the time,” Dick said with a shrug, and that seemed to be that.

* * *

Bruce let Tim replace the knob on his bedroom door so that he had one that locked with a key. After that Tim kept it locked all the time unless he was in it, and for a while this seemed to fix the problem.

Then Jason announced that his English textbook and one of his notebooks was missing. He tracked them down in the den while Alfred was enjoying some tea and marched right up to the butler to ask, “Have you seen my English textbook?”

Alfred cocked an eyebrow and said, “I have seen it in the past, however, if you are asking me if I have seen it recently, I’m afraid my answer is no.”

“So you didn’t pick it up today? Or my notebook?”

“Why would I have picked up your book and notebook?”

“I left them in the library this afternoon,” Jason said. “I was working on homework and I left all my things in a stack on one of the tables. Maybe you were cleaning up in there, or…?”

“I haven’t even been up to the library today. I was busy in the kitchen baking for the charity event at Leslie’s clinic.”

Jason, looking irritated, swiveled and saw that Tim was curled up in the window seat. Tim was focused on his handheld game device and didn’t look like he was even paying attention to the conversation.

“Maybe Tim took my English book,” Jason said loudly.

Tim looked up from the device, one eyebrow cocked. He said, “Huh?”

“Did you take my English textbook?”

“Why would I?” Tim asked.

“I don’t know. Everyone”—Jason looked pointedly at Bruce, then back at Tim—“was so convinced I was taking your stuff. Maybe you want to get back at me.”

Tim frowned and said, “What would I do with your textbook? If I was going to take something I’d take something useful.”

“You boys do realize there is no reason to steal from each other,” Bruce said. “If there’s something you need you can simply ask me or Alfred for it.”

But Tim and Jason weren’t listening. They went on bickering.

“Stay away from my stuff, Tim,” Jason said.

“I have been,” Tim said.

“Yeah? Let’s go look at your room right now and prove it,” Jason said.

Bruce sighed. Sometimes he didn’t understand how he’d ended up with not just one but three children.

“Jason, I will help you look for the textbook. Leave Tim alone,” Bruce said.

Jason dropped the argument and followed Bruce out of the den. However, they searched the Manor up and down and the textbook didn’t turn up. Dick ran into them as they were searching and started trailing after them, observing but not helping.

“Maybe Tim was right. Maybe the Manor is haunted,” he said.

“If you’re not going to be useful and help us look then go find something else to do,” Bruce said.

Dick smirked and wandered off back to his bedroom.

* * *

Bruce ended up having to purchase a new English textbook for Jason. About a week after he did so, one of Bruce’s watches went missing.

As soon as Bruce noticed it was missing, he got up and went downstairs to talk to Alfred. Alfred was polishing silverware in the kitchen and wasn’t immediately concerned about the missing watch.

“You have several watches. Are you sure it’s gone?” Alfred asked.

“Yes,” Bruce said, nodding. “It was one of my dad’s. I leave it on my desk in the study.”

“Have you asked the boys if one of them took it?”

“Why would one of the boys take it?”

“Children are odd at times, Master Wayne,” Alfred said. “When you were a child you used to sneak into my room and try on my hats.”

Bruce looked at him sharply and said, “No I didn’t.”

Alfred smiled in a way that told Bruce he was trying and failing not to. “You even borrowed one of them once. You ran around outside pretending to be a secret agent. I acted like I didn’t notice. I wouldn’t be surprised if you can’t remember. You were very young.”

Bruce felt oddly embarrassed by this story and corrected their course onto the problem at hand.

“Maybe Tim’s been right all along. Not about the ghost thing, but the fact that somebody is taking things from the house,” Bruce said.

Alfred looked at him sharply and said, “You think someone is breaking in? But how are they getting around the alarm?”

“Catwoman does it all the time,” Bruce said.

“I highly doubt Catwoman stole Jason’s English textbook,” Alfred said.

“Or…”

Bruce trailed off and didn’t finish the thought, but when Alfred shot him a curious look Bruce went on.

“It’s a big house. Trying to break in would be difficult, but if someone was already in the house…”

Alfred looked horrified. He lowered his voice when he asked, “You think someone is living in the house without our knowledge?”

“It’s possible,” Bruce said. “What about food? If someone was living in the house, they’d have to be feeding themselves somehow.”

“I haven’t been paying attention. With three hungry boys in the house I always assume that if something is gone it’s because they took it,” Alfred said.

This was a fair assumption, Bruce admitted to himself.

Alfred set down the sugar spoon he was polishing and the towel. He got up.

“Where are you going?” Bruce asked.

“If there’s a possibility that someone is living in the house without our knowledge, then we should start looking for that person right away,” Alfred said.

Realizing he was right, Bruce got up and followed him.

That day he and Alfred searched all over the house. They checked every safe room and every odd hidden passageway that had been added in by one of Bruce’s more eccentric relatives. They even looked up in the attic and down in the wine cellar, but no matter where they looked they didn’t find any signs that an intruder was living in the house without their knowledge. Contrary to what some people believed, Alfred didn’t spend every waking hour cleaning. One of the guest bedrooms would’ve been Bruce’s best guess for where a mystery individual was staying, but Bruce saw that there was an untouched layer of dust on all the furniture in those rooms.

They reconvened in the kitchen not long before the boys needed to be picked up from school. Somehow they both felt more unsettled than when they started their search, even though they hadn’t found anything.

“Well, what do we do now?” Alfred asked.

“Install cameras?” Bruce suggested.

“I don’t want to live in a surveillance state in our own home.”

“We can’t do motion sensors. You wander around the house too much at night.”

“As do you,” Alfred said. “There is also your costumed friend who visits from time to time to consider.”

Bruce ignored this and said, “I’ll think on it. There’s got to be something we can do.”

“Should we talk to the boys?”

Bruce chewed on the question for a while. At last he said, “I don’t want to spook them unnecessarily, but we might have to. If there is someone living in the house, then—”

Bruce stopped short because something awful had just occurred to him, something that should have occurred to him much earlier. Noticing Bruce’s distress, Alfred said, “Then what?”

“Which one of the boys had their clothing go missing?”

“Timothy, of course. But—” Alfred stopped mid-thought and Bruce could see that it had dawned on him as well.

Timothy was eleven and he was small for his age. If someone had broken into the house and was stealing his clothes, then that someone was probably a child.

* * *

“You think there’s a kid loose in the house?” Jason asked, frowning.

Bruce and Alfred had gathered the boys in Bruce’s study. The Manor’s blueprints were spread out all over Bruce’s desk and Tim and Dick were going through them, exclaiming about secret passageways they hadn’t known about.

“It’s a possibility considering the items that have gone missing and the fact that no one has fessed up to taking them,” Bruce said.

Jason frowned. “But where would they be living?”

“No idea. Alfred and I searched the house up and down today but we didn’t find anything.”

“But you still think it’s possible someone is in the house?”

Bruce considered the question, and offered a tentative nod.

“So what do we do? Do we leave?” Jason asked.

“Alfred and I are going to replace your doorknobs with locking ones like the kind Tim has,” Bruce said. “In the meantime, keep an eye on your belongings. Let us know immediately if you notice something has gone missing.”

Jason nodded, but he still looked worried. Bruce, frustrated, rubbed his face with his hands. The worst part was that he felt like he was forgetting something. Every time he thought about the house he had this vexing feeling that something major was slipping his mind. Hence the blueprints. Bruce hoped that by looking at the house that way whatever it was he was missing would come back to him. He didn’t think the kids were in any kind of immediate danger, but he hated the idea of them feeling unsafe in their own home.

* * *

Another week passed and the random thefts seemed to stop. Everyone locked their bedroom doors at night or when they weren’t in them. Tim developed a habit of following Ace around the house and Jason and Dick spent more time in Bruce and Alfred’s presence than usual, but nothing happened.

Bruce almost allowed himself to relax after that uneventful week. Maybe it hadn’t ever been anything, he thought. Maybe Tim really was just misplacing his clothes. Maybe Jason’s textbook would turn up on a bookshelf years later, having been put away by someone who was trying to be helpful.

Then, on Saturday night, Bruce was about to leave to take Jason to the movies when he heard a muffled scream coming from somewhere in the house. Bruce and Jason looked at each other for a split second as if to confirm that they’d both heard it, then, without exchanging a word, they turned and ran in the direction of the scream, heading back down the hallway to the entryway.

Tim was coming from the opposite direction, moving so fast that he nearly smacked into them.

“I saw someone!” Tim said, pointing back the way he came. “I saw someone outside the game room! They were wearing my jacket, the one that went missing!”

“Did you see their face?” Bruce asked.

Tim shook his head sharply.

“Tell me more, Tim. How tall were they? Did they look like an adult?”

Tim’s hands were shaking, but he steadied himself and answered Bruce’s questions. “They looked small, my age maybe. It was dark in the hallway but I definitely saw them.”

“Which way did they go?”

“They took off toward the library.”

Bruce took a split second to consider this and said, “Boys, go to the kitchen and get Alfred. Send Alfred to the library, but stay together downstairs in the kitchen. You should text Dick too and tell him to stay at his friend’s house for now. Do you understand?”

They nodded and went at once.

When they were gone, Bruce looked down the dark hallway. He went over to the light switch and flipped the overhead lights on.

It was empty.

“I’m not angry,” he said as he started walking. “You can come out. If you need some help, I can help you.”

He’d only taken a few steps, but he stopped and listened for a moment. There was no response. 

It took a few minutes to walk the entire first floor. He walked and paused and walked and paused, stopping to listen every now and then and repeating that he wasn’t angry at whoever it was who was in the house. However, except for his own voice and the tapping of his shoes on the floor, it was totally, utterly silent. But it was the sort of weighted silence that gave Bruce goosepimples. He felt like he was being watched.

Alfred finally tracked him down about five minutes later.

“Timothy said he saw a strange child in the Manor,” Alfred said.

Bruce nodded.

“Should we call the police?”

Bruce considered the question for a moment, but he already knew he didn’t like the idea of the police tramping through the house. What if the child saw police officers and bolted? Clearly they didn’t have anywhere else to go. So he shook his head.

“Alright then. Let’s get searching,” Alfred said.

Bruce and Alfred did another sweep of the house, giving particular attention to the library. When they didn’t find anyone on the first floor, they moved on to the second and third floors and searched them as well. Jason and Tim’s curiosity could only be contained for so long, so once the initial search turned up nothing, they came out of the kitchen and followed Bruce and Alfred around, occasionally texting Dick updates and, to Bruce’s surprise, getting along for a change.

Bruce didn’t pay anyone else much mind, however. That nagging feeling was back, the feeling that he was forgetting something important. He had to stop for about ten minutes in the front entryway just to stand there and think about the house. This time he thought beyond the Manor, and considered the grounds as well.

The next time Alfred and the kids passed through Bruce said, “Alfred.”

The little crowd stopped and Alfred said, “Yes?”

“There’s something unusual about the property. Right?”

Alfred frowned as he considered Bruce’s question. He was still frowning when he said, “Well, I recall your father mentioning something about a cave under the Manor, but I don’t see—”

The cave. The library.

Bruce turned and started walking in that direction at once.

“Master Bruce?” Alfred said as Bruce passed him. “What does the cave have to do—?”

“There’s a cave below the house?” Jason said.

Bruce didn’t respond to anyone. He just kept walking. He could hear that they were all following him, but he didn’t turn around to look. 

Now that Alfred had jogged his memory, it was all coming back. His father told him about the cave once when he was a kid. Bruce had an eccentric naturalist ancestor named Irma Henriette Wayne who caused a minor scandal in 1899 when she announced she was foregoing marriage to spend all her time studying bats. She also made one major adjustment to the Manor.

The library doors will still open when Bruce reached it, so he went in and headed to the back of the library. An old grandfather clock, unusually large, sat against the wall in a wide blank space between two shelves. Alfred and the kids caught up to Bruce in time to watch him push it out of the way, revealing a steep, narrow staircase that headed down into the bowels of the earth.

A gust of cold, musty air swept through the room, rustling the papers left on the table where Jason often worked on his schoolwork.

Bruce turned and saw the kids’ astonished faces. He told Alfred, “I’ll need a flashlight.” 

“I shall fetch you one,” Alfred said, and departed immediately to go get it.

In the meantime, Jason and Tim leaned into the passageway and looked down. There wasn’t much to see aside from old brickwork and a few cobwebs.

“Can we go down too?” Jason asked.

“Absolutely not,” Bruce said.

Alfred returned with the flashlight in short order and handed it to Bruce. Bruce turned it on and started to make his way down the passageway, absently reminding Alfred not to let the boys follow him down before he disappeared from their view.

He made slow progress, wary of tripping and falling on the steep staircase. He reached the end of the steps faster than he was expecting, however, traveled through a tight passageway that led out to the huge open expanse of the cave. A bigger staircase also constructed out of brick and mortar provided access to the cave floor. It was damp down there under the earth, and chilly. The squeaking of bats filled the air and it smelled of guano.

Instead of heading the rest of the way down, Bruce went over to the edge and shined his flashlight down into the cave.

There was someone there.

Bruce felt a stab of alarm, even though this was what he’d been expecting to find. He pointed the flashlight at the person’s face.

She squinted in the light and lifted up a hand to cover her eyes. Something on her wrist flashed. It took Bruce a moment to realize it was his missing watch.

* * *

The girl didn’t say anything, but she did not put up a fight when Bruce asked her if she would come back upstairs into the house. When she followed Bruce through into the Manor, Tim and Jason’s eyes got so wide it was almost comical.

For a moment, nobody seemed to know what to say.

“Boys, Alfred, this is our mystery visitor,” Bruce said.

The girl didn’t say anything. She studied Jason, then Tim, and then Alfred before turning back to look up at Bruce.

“Those are my sweatpants,” Tim said, pointing at her legs.

Bruce looked down at the girl’s pants and saw that they were indeed Tim’s. She was looking at them too, an unreadable expression on her face. She was also wearing Tim’s socks as well, and he had no doubt that under the jacket would be one of Tim’s shirts.

“Maybe we should find somewhere to sit down,” Bruce said.

He and Alfred ended up taking her to the kitchen. Alfred made her something to eat while Bruce sat at the table asking questions that went unanswered. Tim and Jason sat on the other side of the table, watching.

“What’s your name?” Bruce asked her.

She looked at him for a moment, but didn’t answer the question.

“How did you get down into the cave?” he asked.

The girl was still staring at him.

“Do you have parents? Or a guardian? Where are they?”

She shot glances at him, but didn’t say anything. Bruce wondered if she was mute. Or perhaps she didn’t speak English.

Bruce knew how to ask some basic questions in a few different languages. Since she was Asian, he started with Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin before moving on to Spanish, Russian, French, and Hindi. However, none of the languages seemed to be familiar to her.

“Maybe she’s deaf,” Jason said.

“Commentary is not helpful, Jason,” Bruce said.

“What if you have to communicate with sign language?” Tim asked.

Bruce shot the boys a look. The expression on his face must’ve conveyed how serious this was, because they both fell silent.

Since questioning got nowhere, however, Bruce sat back. He let Alfred feed her and chatter about nothing in particular in that way that always seemed to work wonders on the vexed and exhausted. The girl didn’t respond to anything Alfred said either, but she didn’t seem bothered by him, and she ate everything he handed to her.

One odd thing Bruce noticed was the strange behavior of the dog. Ace liked children generally, but it was unusual for him to warm to anyone right away. However, when Ace wandered into the kitchen after they’d been sitting around it for about an hour, he went right up to the girl and put his head on her knee so that she could scratch his neck. Bruce suspected this was more than an unusual show of friendliness on the dog’s part.

Bruce noticed other things as well. Her clothes smelled a little stale from being down in the cave, but her skin looked clean enough and she knew how to use a fork and knife. Maybe she _was_ deaf like Jason had suggested. Bruce knew very little sign language, just some basic signs and questions, but he tried them. The girl seemed more interested in the sign language than she had when he was speaking any of the other languages and watched him intently. However, she still did not respond.

Eventually he and Alfred stepped out of the room to speak privately, but they didn’t go far. They stood in the entryway to the kitchen so they could keep an eye on the girl while Jason and Tim were talking to her.

“How on earth did she get down into the cave? I forgot all about that passageway. I haven’t looked at it in years,” Alfred said.

Bruce shook his head. “Your guess is as a good as mine.”

“The dog’s behavior is odd.”

“I noticed that too.”

“How long do you think she’s been sneaking about the house?” Alfred asked.

“I have a feeling it’s been a while,” Bruce said. 

“What do we do with her?”

That was the big question, the one Bruce kept going over and over again in his mind.

“I’ll contact Commissioner Gordon and see if he can quietly look into any open cases of missing children. Nobody would choose living in a damp cave if they have a place to go back to,” Bruce said. “Do you mind keeping an eye on the kids while I go call him? She doesn’t seem to understand anything I say, but I’d still prefer not to talk to him where she can hear.”

An odd expression crossed Alfred’s face. Bruce said, “What?”

“Nothing,” Alfred said. His tone sounded deliberately mild.

“You have something to say?”

Alfred’s expression was wry. “You have an unusual talent for finding children in need. I am curious where such an ability came from.”

“This isn’t like the other times,” Bruce said, shaking his head. “I’m sure this girl has some family that she can go back to. Dick, Jason, and Tim had nobody.”

Alfred raised his eyebrows and said, “We shall see, Master Wayne. We shall see.”

Bruce sighed. “Can you keep an eye on the kids or not?”

“Of course I can,” Alfred said.

Shaking his head, Bruce left to go call Commissioner Gordon. He was sure the girl had somebody she could go back to. And if she didn’t…well, that was a problem he’d solve when he came to it.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry this entire AU has just turned into me making sure Bruce still gets all of his kids. If you're wondering whether or not I wrote one for Damian, Duke, and Stephanie as well, yes I did
> 
> Bruce will soon find out that Cassandra can talk, but only a little bit (she just doesn't trust them all the way yet). It will take a lot longer to find out that she found the cave first, not the Manor. I believe that according to canon Cass is closer to Jason's age than Tim's, but she is closer to Tim's size so she steals his clothes instead of Jason's (sorry Tim). She'll eventually give everything back, but Bruce lets her keep the watch. 
> 
> I'll probably post the next one in a few days. Thanks for reading!


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